Shayne Looper: Why is God in an orange jumpsuit?

Shayne Looper

Monday

Feb 21, 2011 at 12:01 AMFeb 21, 2011 at 9:23 PM

You don’t hear people talk about “Judgment Day” anymore. No one reminds us that we are going to “meet our maker.” In the past, everyone knew about the final judgment. Even popular entertainment, from films like “Heaven Can Wait” to animated shorts like “Pluto’s Judgment Day,” made frequent reference to it. And it had been that way from time immemorial.

You don’t hear people talk about “Judgment Day” anymore. No one reminds us that we are going to “meet our maker.” In the past, everyone knew about the final judgment. Even popular entertainment, from films like “Heaven Can Wait” to animated shorts like “Pluto’s Judgment Day,” made frequent reference to it. And it had been that way from time immemorial.

The Old Testament poet imagined God coming to earth, draped in a judge’s robes: “He comes, he comes to judge the earth. He will judge the world in righteousness.” And it was not just the Jewish people who expected to face a heavenly court. So did the rest of the world.

Plato taught that each soul would face judgment after death. Ancient Egyptians believed they would stand before a heavenly tribunal in the next life. Assyrian and Babylonian religions and, later, Zoroastrianism and Islam all believed in some form of final judgment.

But today the expectation is that, if God does come to earth, he will not be wearing a judge’s black robes but an orange jumpsuit. After all, who is he to judge us? We’re the ones who have been wronged. It’s our rights that have been violated.

The conviction that God is “the judge of all the earth” was, in the past, broadly held. But these days the black robes hang in our closets, not his. “On the charge of criminal neglect, how does the defendant plead?” God is before the bench, and humanity holds the gavel.

If God makes a vigorous defense, we may vote to acquit. But the evidence against him seems pretty overwhelming: Haiti, Indonesia, New Orleans, wars in the Middle East and Asia. Add to that ten thousand private offenses: the Bernie Madoffs, abusive priests, charlatan evangelists, tragic accidents, untimely deaths. God has got a lot of explaining to do.

This almost 180-degree change in perception has gone largely unnoticed by social commentators. What could have caused a paradigm shift of this magnitude in the space of a few generations? People once experienced awe – or at least fear or guilt – when they thought of God. Now they feel nothing except, perhaps, a slight grudge.

To what can we attribute this change in the thought landscape? One certainly must include belief in progress in all its forms. Only in that rich soil could both communism and popular Darwinism take root and flourish as they did.

But humanity has not always worshiped Progress. It was not Plato but Bacon who first bowed the knee. By the last century belief in progress was so complete that the 1933 World’s Fair took as its theme, “The Century of Progress.” Progress has given us the ascendancy of man and diminution of God. Now when a voice cries “All rise,” it is man who has entered the room.

Another essential element in this worldview shift is an almost continual emphasis on individual rights and individual worth. While this is a good thing in many ways, one unintended consequence has been that people no longer think of their responsibilities to God, but rather of his responsibilities to them – usually in terms of physical health and social well being.

Under these influences, people have come to regard religion almost entirely in terms of what it can do for them. Whether or not it is true is quite beside the point. Can it make me happy? Can it alleviate poverty and improve self-esteem? If it can’t do that, what good is it?

Postmodernism, with its suspicion of truth narratives, comes into play here. Belief has been reduced from confidence in the veracity of a claim to an expression of personal approval. We believe in God in the same way we believe in American-made cars and public education.

But ideas that are taken for granted today will be replaced tomorrow, as one sea wave is replaced by the next. Yet with all these changes, God remains the judge. And one of these days he will reclaim his robes and take his seat on the bench.

Shayne Looper is the pastor at the Lockwood Community Church in Michigan. He can be reached at salooper@dmcibb.net.